Americans in Paris's

The Attack

Crit

At the risk of sounding like Hemingway advising you to skip the last 60 pages of Huck Finn, you should really walk out on this right after Amin's (Ali Suliman) interview with the Christian priest. Until that point, this is an intriguing exploration of what you can never know about the person you think you know the most about--particularly when she (Reymond Amsalem) straps on a bomb and kills herself and a bunch of restaurant patrons. 

Unfortunately, the last 20 minutes or so are devoted to explanations that are rote and not remotely as interesting as the mysteries they replace. Or, as Hem put it, the rest is cheating.
 

The Bling Ring

Crit

Poor Scotty wrote a story once that began "The very larcenous are different from you and me," and Ernest said, "Yes, they have more cool shit."

This was fun for about 15 minutes, but with nothing instructional to take away from it, it became a tedious repetition of callow youngsters finding unlocked doors at stars' houses and helping themselves to stuff. A far more rewarding text on the same theme was a T-shirt I saw earlier in the day: Eat the Rich: They Taste Like Chicken.

Trailer

• The Spectacular Now--Ferris Bueller redux?

Just a shot away

20 Feet from Stardom

Crit

So, maybe a year ago I tracked down the answer to a question I'd long wondered about. But Merry Clayton herself tells the story way better than Wikipedia: she gets a call late at night, some English group is in town, the Roller-somethings, and she needs to come to the studio. So she puts a mink coat over her silk pajamas and leaves her curlers in--she's way pregnant, so she's not gonna get dolled up at that hour--and shows up to wail, repeatedly, 3 of the most haunting, blood-curdling syllables in the annals of rock & roll. Then goes home.

This is a magical, a magnificent, but also a conflicted film, torn between being-a-solo-star-doesn't-matter-as-long-as-you're-true-to-your-soul-and-to-you-music and I-wanted-to-be-a-star-dammit-and-should-have-been. Darlene Love had to suffer Phil Spector's abuse and thievery of credits, but eventually found a useful late-night patron. Lisa Fischer, maybe the purest voice of anyone in the film, seemingly never hungered for the spotlight. Lots of stories, and lots of ways to define success. But mostly, lots of song.

Nine-year itch

Compare/contrast discussion question: which film has the better rape joke?

This Is the End

Crit

Seriously, this has no right to be this funny. I mean, come on, an extended argument about uncontrollable semen strewing? How can that be hilarious? And yet.

Presumably in states where it's legal, the deluxe edition of the DVD will come with an ounce of weed, and then you won't even have to notice that it's overlong and has significant stretches of nonhilarity in the second and third acts.

Before Midnight

Crit

When I say that this lacks the conversational verisimilitude of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (and while we're here, I might as well tender my plea to whomever I lent my DVDs of these to: please! May I have them back?!), that shouldn't be taken as a criticism, or not a criticism that matters, or not a criticism that should get in the way.

These are probably not conversations that a couple would have all in one day. But they are conversations that they would have, or that they would desperately avoid having, over the past nine years, during which, unlike the nine years before that and the 20-odd before that, they have been pretty consistently together. In other words, this installment telescopes into a few hours the words that were automatically telescoped by circumstances in the previous films.

But what words. No matter what happens in the next nine years and subsequent nine-year spans, I want to spend as much time as I can with these people, and envying Jesse's opportunity to wake up next to Céline, "hearing [her] think."

Trailers

• Grown Ups 2--Oh, please.
• White House Down--No, really: please.
• Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain--Perhaps I will, perhaps not.
• The World's End--More apocalypse from the Shaun of the Dead gang.
• Fruitvale Station--Crisis on the BART.

All's well

Much Ado About Nothing

Crit

I was raised Catholic, so I don't have any trouble getting my mind around a plot that turns around the question of a bride's virginity (and after all, even today most grooms would be a tad nonplussed by seeming evidence of the beloved's infidelity on the eve of the wedding), but here's what I would tell those who find Joss Whedon's Shakespearean romp any less than marvelous because it operates in a morally foreign universe. The essential morality here isn't about hymenate intactness, it's about the willingness of some people to do anything evil to satisfy a grudge and the ready credulity of some good people in believing ill of others. And those qualities have no sell-by date.

Trailers

• Girl Most Likely--Kristen Wiig and Annette Bening make a silly story seem almost promising.
• In a World . . . --The long-awaited dramedy about trailer voiceover artists. No, seriously, I'm eager.
• Don Jon--Who does Joseph Gordon-Levitt think he is, Wooody Allen? He wrote, directed, and stars in a film about porn addiction.
• Closed Circuit--Terrorism, intrigue, and government snooping.

Annie, are you OK?

Bad 25

WHC

Maybe if Bad had changed my life, instead of just being the source of another catchy pop song or two from the putative king thereof, I wouldn't have found this overlong and underambitious, even rote, almost lazy. Then too, if I had read more about the documentary beforehand, maybe I'd have known that it's an accurately titled 25th-anniversary paean to a single album and a tiny, sanitized slice of the life of the man who made it, and I wouldn't have expcted anything about that "other stuff," as director Spike Lee dismissively termed it in the question-and-answer session afterward.

That Q&A, though--far more A, 'cause frankly Spike doesn't need much Q--would have been worth the price of admission even had their been a price for admission, as Lee riffed on everything from the NBA Finals (he's rooting for the Spurs) to "Columbus Syndrome" among gentrifiers who lack respect for the existing cultures of the Brooklyn and Harlem neighborhoods they colonize. New Haven and the Fesitival of Arts and Ideas was lucky to get him here.

Overcome

4 Little Girls (1997)

WHC

The second-happiest surprise in this film about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, screened on opening night of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas as part of a package of documentaries by Spike Lee and producer Sam Pollard, is how often we laugh. Time doesn't heal all, but it helps focus memories on the living girls, and how they made smiles. Then too, much of the humor comes from veterans of the civil rights movement recalling the racism that can now, the virulence dissipated, be parsed as absurdity. (If you thought Michael Moore eviscerated Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, wait 'til you see what Spike does to the pathetic shell of George Wallace, a year or so from the grave. To me this sequence was far too painful to be funny, but mine was clearly a minority opinion.)

The happiest surprise in this film is that this iconic quartet of martyrs to the movement is presented as daughters and sisters and friends, never as symbols. If you are a parent, I defy you to listen to these parents, bereft for a third of a century by the time the film was made, and not imagine yourself robbed of one unutterably precious not just senselessly but hatefully, calculatedly, as part of a program to crush you and those who share your skin color. I've read Taylor Branch's excellent 3-volume history of Dr. King's time, but nothing in that made me feel as immediately what being black in Birmingham in 1963 was like as much as the account by Denise McNair's father of having to explain to her why they couldn't eat at a downtown department store lunch counter.

It's a big building with doctors . . .

Airplane!

(1980)

Huh! Who'd have thought I'd have heard Bee-Gees songs twice this weekend: last night "Night Fever" at Citi Field, one of several extra-inning musical jokes (the best: Chuck Berry's "No Particular Place to Go") as a game that started at 1:10 dragged on toward the 20th inning and the dinner hour) and then "Stayin' Alive" tonight, as I pursued my ever more common (and desperate) emotional strategy of ending the weekend with one of my favorite comedies to ease the pain of further soulkilling by a sports obession.

Walden 3

The Kings of Summer

Crit

For the first act, this is as good an entry in the boys-getting-away-from-their-awful-families-and-into-nature subgenre as any I've seen--better than The Goonies, better than Stand by Me, better than The Summer of '42, you name it.

After the first act, it loses some momentum--perhaps not coincidentally when the figurative snake, sexual jealousy, enters the Garden. From that point on, it feels ever more painstakingly plotted (I was surprised not to see an end credit for a young-adult novel basis), though it never loses that early charm altogether. Part of the reason is the performance of Moises Arias as Biaggio, one of the most successful weird characters I've seen onscreen I'm a while. When you can get away with having a character interpret the symptoms of cystic fibrosis as the reason he believes himself gay, you're got some seriously good weird going down.

Late in the film, Biaggio has a conversation with his father, whom we hear but see only neck down as he shaves. The character is credited to one Michael Cipiti, but I'm very much mistaken if that's not Bruce Willis's voice.

Augustine

Crit

A kitchen maid (Soko) in Belle Epoque France has epilepsy, which is treated as "ovarian hysteria" by a doctor (Vincent Lindon) who initially seems well meaning if ambitious before he starts to seem just plain creepy. Transference, countertransference, and sexual healing. Urg. A film about two-thirds as good as it is disturbing--which makes it pretty darned good indeed.

Trailers

• RED 2--Two Oscar winners added to the great cast of the first one. But still . . .
• Mortal Instruments: City of Bones--Another of those I-didn't-know-my-dead-parent-was-a-supernatural flicks.

In the beginning was the Word

Quills

(2000)

A film about intellectual freedom, more ambitious than interesting, more interesting than good, wherein the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush) liberates chambermaids (Kate Winslet) and oppressed brides (Amelia Warner) and corrupts men of God (Joaquin Phoenix) and science (Michael Caine).

All ye know on earth

Stories We Tell

Crit

Questions we ask:

• what is documentary?
• what is objectivity?
• is there such a thing as objectivity?
• if there's such a thing as objectivity, is it something to be valued?
• is the purpose of art to get as close to truth as possible?
• what is truth?
• what is editing?
• what's the relationship between truth and editing?
• is it possible not to edit?
• is covert manipulation of narrative morally superior to overt manipulation? artistically superior?
• what if it's covert until the end, when it becomes overt?
• are there different truths for different participants in a story?
• does the central participant in a story own its truth?

I'm not going to post this at the time it's going to say I posted it, because I may think of some more questions, but I can answer one question right now: how much do I, as the father of a talented young filmmaker myself, love what has become of Sarah Polley's career since she's moved behind the camera, notwithstanding the fact that I didn't much like Take This Waltz. Thinking I might need to watch Away from Her this weekend; I've had it on the DVR hard drive for a while, trying to work up the courage.

It's about sharing

The Aristocrats

(2005)

An ostensibly major league baseball team flies into Miami. For three days, they interact in vile, humiliating, unspeakably obscene acts before crowds of upwards of 20,000 people, receiving surprisingly generous pay for the self-degradation. After the closing show, a reporter asks, "What do you call the act?" The manager replies, "The Mets!"

Sometimes, after your soul has been ground to dust, you just have to laugh; this was a foolproof way to do that.

Vincent Gallo ate my soul

2 Days in New York

(2012)

Oh, my. I really liked Julie Delpy's previous Woody Allenesque directorial effort, 2 Days in Paris, but I was totally unprepared to be so tickled by slapstick as I was tonight--and I would not describe myself as someone who generally responds happily to slapstick. The lunatic script, mostly by Delpy and Alexia Landeau, who plays Marion's lunatic sister Rose, is consistently hilarious, and somehow manages to stay tethered just enough to a recognizable reality.

Chris Rock is perfect as Marion's boyfriend Mingus, whose blackness contributes less to his sudden maddening outsider status than does his Americanness, in the face of visiting in-laws from what is apparently the strangest land on Earth. As was the case in the Paris flick, Delpy's father, Albert Delpy, plays Marion's endearingly goofy father; sadly, her mother, Marie Pillet, was not around for this one.

Just an unbelievable delight.

I wish we had cookies; I wish we had Chessmen

Frances Ha

Crit

Gosh, young people really are young, aren't they? If I were ever going to reject a film because I have scarcely anything in common with the young people therein, it wouldn't be The Breakfast Club, which has plenty more to disrecommend it. It'd be something more like this--but hey, you gimme Greta Gerwig running down New York City streets while Bowie sings "Modern Love," and what am I gonna do?

Some have called this a Gen Y Annie Hall, and I wouldn't go that far, but director and cowriter (with Gerwig) Noah Baumbach has clearly studied that text; the most pointed allusion is a pair of scenes that invoke the lobster scenes in AH. Also Allenesque, though without a direct coefficient in AH, is what I would title The Saddest Trip to Paris Ever.

If I have a gripe, it's that Baumbach seems to attribute to his audience the same flitting attention span often attributed to the demographic he's looking at. We know from his previous films that he can develop a scene, so he must be marrying form to content here--especially inasmuch as the one excruciatingly long scene puts the emphatically postadolescent Frances at a dinner table with people who, while not necessarily older, are ostentatiously grown up.

But hey: I come back to this: 86 minutes spent mostly looking at that face. What could be wrong?

Trailers

• Ain't Them Bodies Saints--Texas noir with Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck, and Ben Foster.
• Before Midnight--Need you ask? By the way, does somebody out there have my copies of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset?